To make the above programs work, you need to have the Reportlab toolkit v1.21 and the xtopdf toolkit installed, in addition to pypyodbc and Python 2.7. (Click on the "Branches" tab on the xtopdf page linked in the previous sentence to download xtopdf.)

I've had an interest in ODBC ever since I first worked, as team leader, on a middleware software product that used ODBC. The middleware was developed at Infosys Technologies, where I worked at the time.

Though ODBC itself had a good architecture, many driver implementations of the time (this was some years ago) were rather slow, so one of the main goals of the product was to improve the performance of client-server or desktop applications (written in Visual Basic or C) that used ODBC for database access.

I remember learning ODBC as part of the project (and teaching it to the team), and reading most of the book "Inside ODBC" by Kyle Geiger, one of the architects of ODBC - it was a fascinating book, that gave a detailed look inside the architecture of ODBC, the reasons for certain design decisions that were made, and so on.

We succeeded in meeting all the goals of the project, and that middleware product was used in many large client-server applications (using VB and Oracle / Sybase) that were developed by Infosys for its clients. I really had a lot of fun working on that project.